Permutation City

by Greg Egan

Maria gazed at the blur of codons, and mentally urged the process on – if not straight towards the target (since she had no idea what that was), then at least … outwards, blindly, into the space of all possible mistakes.

The Butterfly Effect now commonly refers to the principle of controlling a chaotic system with minimum force, through a detailed knowledge of its dynamics.

Paul was twenty-four years old at the time, with no idea what to make of his life. His father had died the year before – leaving him a modest business empire, centred on a thriving retail chain, which he had no interest in managing. He’d spent seven years travelling and studying – science, history and philosophy – doing well enough at everything he tried, but unable to discover anything that kindled real intellectual passion. With no struggle for financial security ahead, he’d been sinking quietly into a state of bemused complacency.

Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a preordained trajectory, onwards and upwards towards ‘perfection’.

Five years ago, she could have worked all night, and suffered nothing worse than a fit of yawning in the middle of the afternoon. Now, she felt like she’d been hit by a train – and she knew she’d be a wreck for days. Thirty-one is old, old, old. Her head throbbed, her whole body ached.

Paul didn’t believe that he ‘was’ his original. He knew he was nothing but a cloud of ambiguous data. The miracle was that he was capable of believing that he existed at all.

Maria absorbed that, trying not to appear too startled. It was like hearing someone admit that they studied chess but never played the game.

Relativity threw out absolute space and time – but it didn’t go far enough. We have to throw out absolute cause and effect!’ Squeak.

The shadows were empty, the darkness was indifferent. Nothing lay beneath the surface of the world. He could have slaughtered a hundred thousand people, and the night would still have failed to conjure up a single apparition to confront him.

‘She was a child of the nineties. Her kindergarten teachers probably told her that the pinnacle of her existence would be fertilizing a rainforest when she died.’

‘You might have come up with something more plausible.’ Durham laughed. ‘Exactly.’

The stillness of the garden began to unnerve him. There was a blankness to the scene he couldn’t penetrate, as if he was staring at an incomprehensible diagram, or an abstract painting he couldn’t quite parse. As he gazed across the lawn, the colours and textures flooding in on him suddenly dissociated completely into meaningless patches of light. Nothing had moved, nothing had changed – but his power to interpret the arrangement of shades and hues had vanished; the garden had ceased to exist.

The whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust … or it doesn’t. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole … or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.’